Tuesday, November 20, 2012

BWJ - Best Ever Brownies

For Baking with Julia this week, we were assigned Best Ever Brownies. Our host was Monica of A Beautiful Mess. Now, I am a little cynical about recipes claiming to be the best ever - that is a pretty broad and subjective claim. I am not sure that these brownies are "the best ever", but they are pretty good.I made mine with the proper chocolate for the first time ever, courtesy of my US trips:

As a heads up, "unsweetened" and "bittersweet" chocolate are not the norm in Australia, hence my chocolate came from the Ghirardelli store in The Great Mall, Milpitas, CA.I probably baked my brownies a smidge too long (~30 minutes), as they were fudgy rather than gooey inside, but this was good - I could not imagine that the critical audience that I have to deal with would have appreciated "gooey" and would instead have interpreted it as "underdone".To see what the other BWJ bakers thought of these, visit the LYL section of the BWJ website.

I like to bake with Ghirardelli chocolate. And, no, I didn't know there was a difference between unsweetened and bittersweet. Thanks for that update. I've just had to stop baking so many sweets with Dorie and Julia. Not enough mouths that will share the wealth. So I enjoy seeing yours and others tasty-looking brownies.

We also love the Ghiradelli chocolate and used it in our gluten free version of this recipe. Quite a few of us seemed to require an additional baking time. Perhaps the recommended 25-28 minute baking time needs to be adjusted. Just saying.

fudgy brownies sounds great - I usually just use 70% chocolate when I see unsweetened and bittersweet - have seen 100% chocolate in Ireland on our trip and was tempted but I think we got distracted by other chocolates - have seen some ghiradrelli in aussie supermarkets recently so maybe we will start to get these packets